8/18/26
Something we talked about on HOW TO SURVIVE 2025 (which you can listen to for free here) was a nationwide grid failure. The New York Times has an article this morning about not if it will happen, but when it will happen. Read it here.
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The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy, thorough, but paywalled article about AI and the publishing industry here.
Some of the comments from literary agents and staffers discussing this article yesterday remind me of when Dorchester/Leisure held a conference call with their thirty biggest creditors, of which I was one. I’m on there with a paper mill, a trucking company, a printer, and various literary agencies, and Leisure is talking about how they intend to operate as if they’re in bankruptcy without actually filing bankruptcy, and leverage the copyrights and IP of the authors in their stable, and one literary agent asked: “How would you like us to spin this to our clients?” Which is a clear sign that this particular agent didn’t have their authors’ wellbeing as their primary goal.
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You probably remember how the generative AI companies — to get around pesky authors complaining that their copyrighted works have been used without their consent or financial renumeration to train the LLMs — have begun buying massive quantities of rare and out-of-print books, stripping the spine to make them easily scannable, and feeding those into the LLMs instead.
Well, some journalists placed a tracker on a shipment of rare books that they suspected had been purchased for such a thing. The shipment ended up in Las Vegas at Amazon’s VGT3 facility — where Amazon is training their own AI.
If Amazon — a company that got its start selling and shipping books — is now buying massive quantities of rare books to feed to their machine god, what then are they doing with the books any indie author or small press uploads to their KDP division…?
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Women In Horror Year: Day 105
Husk by Rachel Autumn Deering
In this all-too-real work of horror fiction, Rachel Autumn Deering explores the mind of a young man who is struggling to cope with the effects of post-war stress, drug addiction, self-doubt, and loneliness as they manifest themselves into his deepest, darkest fears.
Kevin Brooks returns to his rural Kentucky hometown after a three-year-long tour of duty in Afghanistan. He has lost the grandparents who raised him, his lifelong best friend, and his trust in the government he once proudly served. When Kevin meets a kind, young girl named Samantha, he thinks his luck might have finally taken a turn for the better. But something else has its eye on Kevin. Something dark and brooding and mean. Something that knows Kevin better than he knows himself.
Rachel Autumn Deering got her start on the comic book side of the industry, becoming an Eisner and Harvey Award-nominated writer, editor, and book designer for DC/Vertigo Comics, Blizzard Entertainment, Dark Horse Comics, IDW, and others. After conquering that mountain, she turned her sights on prose fiction, writing a half dozen excellent short stories and this superb novella. Then, having conquered horror fiction, she reinvented herself as a rock musician and is usually touring the country. I wish she’d come back to write some more prose, because her’s was a voice this genre desperately could use more of. A unique combination of quiet, psychological horror with a Splatterpunk sensibility, nobody else is writing stuff like Rachel.
At the time of its publication, my cover blurb for Husk stated that “it blew my head off”. I still stand by that. From the casually grim opening sentences to the shattering final chapter, this is a visceral, poetically horrific, and deeply moving examination of battlefield-induced PTSD, and a blistering condemnation of how — having learned nothing from Vietnam — America still treats its servicemembers.
Highly recommended, and a slim read that you can fly through in a single afternoon. Husk is available in paperback and eBook from Tiny Behemoth Press.
